


Weather it all

by Beleriandings



Series: It changes you [4]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Torchwood
Genre: Cybermen - Freeform, Found Family, Gen, Magic, Mortal!Jack, Multi, Poly Relationships, Spoilers for Episode: s08e12 Death in Heaven
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-05
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-17 15:00:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29227374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beleriandings/pseuds/Beleriandings
Summary: It's been raining for a week, but now it's let up a little, so Jack takes Anwen out for a walk on the beach.Little does he know, there are other dangers hidden by the mist.
Relationships: Gwen Cooper/Jack Harkness/Ianto Jones/Rhys Williams, Gwen Cooper/Rhys Williams, Jack Harkness/Ianto Jones
Series: It changes you [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2123109
Comments: 18
Kudos: 27





	Weather it all

**Author's Note:**

> If you haven't read the rest of the series I strongly recommend you do before reading this, because this is pretty much a sequel, and contains heavy spoilers for like.... everything in the series....  
> Other than that, enjoy!

In the years after Torchwood, Gwen had learned a lot of things.

One of those was to watch the weather.

Sometimes, there was beautiful weather out here on the coast, a wide blue horizon and a sky filled with wispy cirrus clouds. On days like that it would be ice cream scoops and affectionately bullying Ianto into wearing a floppy straw sunhat, and Jack teasing the rest of them about pale, freckly Welsh complexions as they smeared thick white suncream on Anwen’s delicate baby skin.

Some days, storms blew in from the Irish Sea, turning the sky to heavy purples and greys. On bad days their power went out, and they lit plenty of candles and sat by the fire and told stories until the storm abated.

Some days though, there was nothing but mist.

Such was today; it had been pouring with rain for a week, the clouds dark and low in the sky. The whole time Anwen had been restless and fretful, unable to sit still and reluctant to go to sleep at night. But now the rain had stopped somewhat, and so Jack had taken her out for a walk on the beach.

Gwen peered out the kitchen window at the sandy shore, watching the two small shapes of Jack and Anwen walking through the damp sand down by the tide-line. They were far enough away that the mist faded their outlines, but not so far away that they’d disappeared into it entirely yet. Jack was walking slower, letting Anwen run ahead. Gwen only hoped she didn’t track in too much sand on – and inside – her boots; usually you had to tip the stuff out of them and Gwen knew Ianto would complain about the extra cleaning.

Not really, though. For all Ianto complained about sand in the hallway carpet and toys covering the living room floor, and despite how terribly nervous he’d been around her when she’d been a new baby, Gwen knew that he was as devoted to her as any of them were.

She smiled, as she stared back down at Jack and Anwen on the beach. It was good for Anwen to get out, she knew. She frowned slightly, remembering the last few days. Anwen had always been an adventurous child, a joyfully restless little bundle of noise and energy ever since she was born, practically.

Her developing magic – and they were still trying to come up with a better name for it, but for now magic would have to do – had only made her more so. Being stuck in the house by heavy rain for the last few days had only made it worse, making her fractious and frustrated, scribbling with her crayons at the dining table and starting to cry when she melted one of them to bubbling slurry in her little fist, in a flash of purple light.

Gwen had consoled her then, as she did every time. But still, she knew that if they didn’t figure out what to do about Anwen’s magic, it would become a problem, sooner or later. Indeed, Gwen hated to admit it – didn’t want Anwen to ever think that anything about her could ever be a problem or an inconvenience, and besides, this was Gwen’s fault not Anwen’s – but in some ways, it already was. When Anwen had been a very little baby that had been one thing. She’d made lights dance above her crib at night, giggling at the soft, unearthly chimes that she could make from nowhere. Jack had talked to some old contacts of his, and they’d run every Torchwood scanner over her and done every test, and they were almost entirely certain that none of this was actually harming Anwen; in fact, it seemed to comfort her in many ways. They’d thought that was that.

But that hadn’t been that, as it turned out. And there was the problem: none of them knew a single thing about this – even Jack, and he’d seen more strangeness than any of them. Anwen was a human four-year-old girl, yes, but she was also something _new_. That much was becoming clearer every single day as she grew, and her magic grew with her.

It had started to manifest in more unpredictable ways at around the same time as she was teething, which may have been a coincidence, but an unfortunate one for the four of them; it had been hard enough trying to comfort her when she was growing from a baby into a toddler, tired and overwrought, without her having power over the forces of the universe to an as-yet-unclear degree; Gwen still remembered the rather fraught day she'd set Ianto's sleeve on fire when he’d tried to lift her out of her high chair. He hadn’t been _hurt_ , really – just a little singed, just requiring a dressing and some painkillers. It had barely even scarred, as Ianto was always keen to remind them.

But it had given them all a scare, not least Anwen herself; she’d cried for hours after, deeply distressed at the sight of a fretful Jack fussing over Ianto’s burn, of all four of them fussing over her and arguing with one another and generally not knowing what to do.

Gwen regretted that; she should have kept a cooler head, shown her daughter that whatever she could do, it was nothing to be ashamed or frightened of.

But that was the thing, wasn’t it? Gwen herself was frightened, so terribly afraid all the time. Not of what Anwen could do, but of the idea that Gwen’s own actions may have given her daughter a terrible burden to bear, and there was nothing she could do to take that away from her now it was given.

“How’re they doing out there?” said Rhys, startling her out of her thoughts. He’d been sitting with Ianto in front of the warm hearth in the living room, but now he’d come in to check on the soup, giving the pot a stir, then coming over to stand behind her. She felt his arms go around her waist, his chin on her shoulder as he peered out the window with her at the beach, and the two distant figures on it.

“Seem to be okay,” said Gwen. “...I just… feel bad, you know? Every time Anwen gets like that. I’m worried about her.”

“Shhh, stop it. Not your fault. Just the bloody weather, eh?”

“I didn’t mean...”

He sighed. “I know what you meant, love. And _that_ …” said Rhys gently, giving her a soft squeeze, “that is _definitely_ not your fault.”

Gwen sighed, arms tightening on his around her waist. “Yeah. Yeah, I know.”

He laid his head to the side, letting her lean back against him. “I just hope–”

“Wait, Rhys,” said Gwen, squinting up into the sky. There was something up there, within the clouds, something moving.

 _Glimmering_ , almost.

Suddenly she was alert, every muscle in her body tense as it always was, when there was a hint of something, anything, that might threaten their little family, their safety so hard won. “Rhys… what is that?”

“What?”

She pointed up. “Look. In the clouds. ...I think it’s coming from up beyond the cliff-top.”

“What – oh.” He squinted. “I dunno. ...Could be one of them drones?”

Foreboding trickled down Gwen’s spine as she saw that Jack had come to a stop, down on the beach below. “I don’t think–”

And then, all at once, they heard Ianto’s voice coming from the living room, raised in urgency.

“Gwen? Rhys? ...Have you seen the news?”

* * *

Jack pulled his coat close around him against the damp late autumn mist, pushing his cold hands down into the pockets. He smiled gently as he saw Anwen’s small figure running along ahead of him, leaving a little trail of footprints in the damp sand. The mist was turning everything a bit hazy, and he didn’t want to let her out of his sight.

“Don’t get too far ahead, okay?” he called to her.

“I won’t!” she yelled back over her shoulder, dutifully running a very little bit slower.

Jack smiled slightly to himself, deciding not to argue for now. He remembered when he was a child, how it had been when storms rolled in off the ocean, or the breakwater failed and the peninsula flooded with the storm surge. Attack drills and false alarms too sometimes, which could drag on for days and days. He and Gray had been kept indoors during those, and he remembered the restlessness he’d felt in their small home, the longing for the warm air on the beach and the touch of the sunlight.

There was no sun and no sea breeze today, but he knew exactly how Anwen felt. And so he’d volunteered to take her out as soon as the rain had stopped, thinning to just a bracing Welsh mist. He had left Ianto, Gwen, and Rhys curled up on the sofa together, with a kiss to each of their foreheads while Anwen bounced excitedly on the balls of her feet by the door. Sure enough, she seemed delighted to be out of the house, and that was making Jack smile too.

Not that the weather was much better than the rain; it was still damp and misty, the sea-fog they got sometimes sitting thick and heavy over their little stretch of coastline, beading his buttoned-up greatcoat with tiny drops. Still. A pot of soup was cooking on the stove, and it would be done by the time he and Anwen were back, peeling off their mist-damp clothes to dry by the fire.

He himself was almost as glad as Anwen to be out, Jack had to admit; he’d never done well with staying indoors and idle for too long. He smiled slightly to himself as he watched Anwen running along the damp sand, her bright purple hooded raincoat and red wellies a splash of colour against the washed-out tones of the misty shore, vivid against the dark rolling green of the hillside on one side, the slate grey of the sea vanishing into the fog on the other. She knew not to get too far ahead of him, but he was inclined to let her go a little way if she wanted.

After all, it was safe here. That was a large part of the reason they’d chosen the place at all.

It was just as Jack was thinking this, that he heard a noise from up in the sky.

His head darted up, a response trained into him as a child himself. It had come from near the cliff tops, cutting through the strangely dead hush of the misty shoreline. It was distinct from the cries of seagulls and the constant shushing of the waves that he’d got used to again over the last four years. Blending into the background of his awareness just like when he was little, falling asleep curled up in a mass of blankets with Gray using him as a pillow, lulled by the ceaseless rhythm of the waves in counterpoint to one another’s heartbeats and breathing.

But he’d always been able to spot other sounds; it had been an essential skill, in a colony under threat of attack. Not that it had helped much, in the end.

Jack shook himself; if there really was cause for alarm, then this was no time to be slipping back into the past. He couldn’t see much up by the hillside where the cliffs ended, the green tops of the hills disappearing into the layer of mist.

No, wait. He _could_ see something, he realised. Several things actually, emerging from the mist. Growing closer.

Human figures, he realised. Or human-shaped, at least, flying through the air in a way that reminded him far too much of–

Silver metal, glinting in the pale grey light.

Jack’s mouth went dry.

He started to run.

“Anwen!” he yelled, too panicked to care that they’d hear; they’d undoubtedly seen them, anyway. He didn’t want to look up, sprinting flat out across the sand to the little girl, catching her up easily with his long stride. He flung himself down to pull her close to him, then risked another glance up.

And there they were, emerging from the mist on harsh blue hover thrusters, limned in bright metal, blank eyes and noiseless save for the low background hum that permeated the space between.

 _Cybermen_.

He wasn’t close enough to see their blank eyes, but he could well enough imagine them, staring down at him and Anwen, locking on. There were two of them that he could see, but in the brief second he stood there another one emerged. Then a fourth, a fifth.

Jack didn’t pause a moment longer. He scooped up Anwen in his arms, carrying her at his shoulder - and oh, it was so much harder now than when she was a baby, when between the four of them and their worry she had hardly had a moment when one of them hadn't been holding her or bouncing her or stroking her little head – and turning on his heel, starting to run back up the beach.  
  
If he could just make it to the cottage… some part of him told him even that wouldn’t be safe, that an ordinary house wouldn’t hold off a cyberman intent on killing or converting. But he pushed that away. They’d think of something. He had the others, there had to be something. Mostly though, his mind was horribly blank with fear, Anwen clutched tight against his chest, already starting to whimper with distress.

He’d been mortal again for four years now, and he’d never felt quite so vulnerable – or so heavily weighed with responsibility – as he did now.  
Jack was running, but it was so difficult to run on sand, slowing him down as he pelted up the beach where the sand was looser packed, dryer even after all the rain, his boots sending it flying all around him as he sank. Anwen was wiggling and crying in his arms too, which didn't make it any easier, whimpering in distress close to his ear and flailing her hands at something behind him. But didn't look back; he just clung to her, running forward. Soon he would make it to the house, this time, _this time_ … he’d save her.

He had to save her; if he couldn’t even save one child, then what was he good for?  
  
“ _Jack!”  
_  
He breathed hard as before him he saw three figures emerge at the door of the house; Gwen, flanked by Rhys with a shotgun, and Ianto with one of their old assault rifles and Jack's own holster looped over one arm, bringing it out to him. Between them, Gwen had the heavy-duty alien plasma blaster they’d salvaged from the Hub weapons vault slung over one shoulder, aiming into the sky. Gwen's face was grim, while Ianto's eyes had glazed over slightly, fixed upwards, unable to look away from the grey roil of mist filled with those familiar, dreaded shapes in the sky, metallic and glimmering through the heavy sea-fog. Rhys was just staring at Jack, running towards them up the beach with Anwen; he looked as though he'd start running towards them too if Gwen wasn't holding him back.  
  
"Jack!" yelled Ianto. "Get down!"  
  
But even as he shouted, Jack knew it was too late; over the howling of the wind, he heard another sound, the powering up of a cyber weapon behind him. He gritted his teeth, time seeming to slow as he dropped to his knees, curling his body instinctively around Anwen, trying to shield her as best he could; they might kill him, he’d had long enough, but the idea of them hurting her was too much for him to bear. It was so unfair, she was so little, and she’d been brought into the world and lived this long in peace against such terribly long odds.

Jack curled around her, pressing a kiss to her forehead even as she tried to reach back, up into the sky. She deserved to be protected, and to have more time, and–

And Jack heard another sound, close at hand. He felt a strangeness in the air, a kind of distortion that felt both disorientating and somehow familiar. A moment later he felt a stab of alarm, as he realised that the wash of dizziness passing through him was the typical result of standing too close to a spatio-temporal anomaly; something the human brain wasn’t built to process, that scrambled the logic on which the world usually operated and human senses along with it, so delicately tuned to normal states of operation.

He clutched Anwen closer to his chest, defensive once more. Until he looked down at her, the way she was squirming and twisting in his arms, her little hands extended over his shoulder and up into the sky behind him.

The sky, which seemed to be _rippling_ when he turned to look. Not just the mist, not just the cybermen floating in it, but the fabric of space-time itself. Anwen was mumbling incoherently to herself, waving her hands like she was playing some childish game and getting frustrated with it. But the fabric of reality danced along with their motion, twisting and folding, more and more and sending great waves of unreality crashing through the sky.

Jack simply sat back on his heels in the sand and stared, wide-eyed; he had no idea what to do. But as he watched, the cybermen where desperately trying to retreat as the ripples became waves, and finally great breaking swells. The air crackled with energy, making the hair at the back of Jack’s head stand on end, and he could smell ozone, crackling electricity in the air and a strange, sweet _something_ ; it could almost be flowers, he thought, except that at the same time it was utterly unlike the smell of anything real or living.

As he stared, he realised Ianto, Gwen and Rhys had run up and were standing all around him, trying to shield him and Anwen while also staring up at the sky in wide-eyed, speechless horror.

Because it _was_ horrifying, in the way that unreality so often was, alien to the human senses by its very definition. He could see the very stuff of time and space bubble up around each floating cyberman, forming an enclosing pocket from which they could not escape, much as they tried. And they were trying, desperately struggling and scrabbling for a way out in as much obvious terror as an emotionless shell of a being like that was capable of. But to no avail; each cyberman was thoroughly trapped.

And the bubbles were contracting in on themselves, Jack realised as he stared. He exchanged a look with Ianto beside him, who was staring so fixedly and so wide-eyed that Jack could see the whites of his eyes all around. Anwen was still crying out in his arms, squeezing her little fists closed agonisingly slowly, making the bubbles contract with a shuddering, slow, but inexorable force. Jack didn’t even think of trying to stop her; he didn’t know if he even could, but like the others, he was transfixed, just staring, as though that same force was weaving through the air and holding him in place too. Dimly, he registered Gwen coming up beside him and trying to speak to Anwen, to take her from his arms even, but she was ignoring her, so fully focused on the sky that Gwen gave up after half a moment.

In that time, the bubbles surrounding the cybermen had shrunk further, crushing and compressing the very space inside itself.

It was slow, drawn-out, until it wasn’t. In another moment something seemed to snap; Anwen let out a yelp and closed her small fists tight, and at the same moment the bubbles imploded to nothing with a rolling spatial shock-wave. The air seemed to splutter and crackle, and there was a vast, echoing tearing sound that made some instinctive part of him that dealt in standard universal logic and was used to the usual laws of physics go running for cover.

And then he opened his eyes, and–

“They’re gone?” breathed Ianto beside him. “What? How…?”

“What the hell just happened? What were those things? Where… I mean, was that… Anwen...?!?” asked Rhys, looking dumbstruck as he stared between the empty sky and his daughter, now squirming in Jack’s arms. Jack hastened to put her down on the ground and she started crying immediately, deep, noisy sobs as she ran for Rhys’s legs. He immediately threw his gun aside and wrapped her in a hug, pulling her to his chest as she sobbed, loud and shuddering and distraught.

Jack exchanged looks with Gwen and Ianto, both wearing looks somewhere within the range of confused, haunted and profoundly disturbed. But before they could do anything else Gwen looked determinedly at the other two, then down to Anwen who was making grabby hands at her, inconsolable in Rhys’s arms.

Immediately Gwen had thrown down the plasma blaster and dropped down beside her too, wrapping herself around her daughter. She was still holding Ianto’s arm, and so he came with her, pulled into a hug. And so of course Jack found himself kneeling down with them, all heedless of the wet sand soaking into them and their guns dropped to the sand all around them as they held Anwen in an encompassing, protective ring.

Jack pressed a kiss into the damp bits of hair over her forehead where the hood of her raincoat had fallen back and felt his heart ache.

It was Ianto that stood up first, extricating himself with a deep, shuddering breath, staring back towards the house. “Come on, let’s all get back inside,” he said, and Jack could tell he was making a deliberate effort to keep his voice steady. To keep himself from screaming, perhaps. “There’s still that soup. And I can put the kettle on. I think we all need it.”

Anwen sniffed, wriggling away from Gwen and Rhys to go and take his hand.

* * *

Back inside the house, they all busied themselves quickly, gratefully; Ianto ladled out the food and then made them a tray of hot drinks after; Jack was gratified to note his coffee had a dash of something strong in it. Meanwhile, Rhys changed Anwen out of her wet clothes and put them in the wash, toweled her hair and hung her raincoat to dry, putting her in clean pyjamas and her favourite green dinosaur jumper. Meanwhile, Gwen was locking the guns away again safely, and Jack was alternating between spooning up soup at Ianto’s insistence, phoning Martha, and staring at the news which had been left on in the background, leaning against the wall and shifting from foot to foot nervously.

Not that Jack liked the answers when he got them; it had been Martha who had told him over the phone what happened, in the end. Her voice had been hushed and full of suppressed horror as she told him about how the cybermen had crept into dead bodies, had brought them digging their way up from the grave to target the living. They must have flown over from the tiny church cemetary in the village, around the other side of the headland, they’d worked out; five cybermen, summoned by the lure of five brightly-burning lives being lived in peace out here on the shoreline. Sent to snuff them out. The very thought made Jack shudder, made him want to hold on to Ianto and Anwen and Rhys and Gwen and never, ever let them go.

And as if that hadn’t been enough, there had been another rumour too. Martha hadn’t wanted to tell Jack at first until he’d made her; she’d heard from some of her old contacts in UNIT that a woman called Missy had been involved, a regeneration of the Master. Together, it was enough to set Jack’s heart racing with fear, his mind spiraling.

Maybe he’d got complacent, he couldn’t help but think. It wasn’t like he could still just put his immortal body in between those he loved and danger anymore, wasn’t like he could come back from the dead and keep fighting for them all over again anymore.

Instead, Anwen had done the protecting; four years old, and already fighting. He only wished she’d never had to, would never have to again.

The others had quickly spotted how Jack was feeling, though; maybe Ianto understood best of all, because he’d clearly been shaken by it himself, more so than he wanted to show. He couldn’t imagine how this felt for Ianto, with all that had happened.

The fact that Jack was now almost certain the cybermen had gone, their plan thwarted, wasn’t as much of a comfort as it should have been.

All the while he was also watching Ianto out of the corner of his eye, checking him every moment he was within his eyeline. Ianto seemed to be moving with the kind of frenetic, determined energy that made Jack think that he was desperately trying to keep it all at bay, but it would come back on him soon enough. Jack resolved to be there when it did, to help him through every bit of it he could; he couldn’t do much, but he could at least do that.

When Ianto came in with the tea tray again he put it down and met Jack’s eye, coming to stand in front of him and take his hands, and Jack saw the understanding there immediately. He smiled back at Ianto, though even he couldn’t summon much warmth to it, shaken as he was. Still, he knew Ianto understood; Ianto was one of the few people he’d told the full story, after Gray and everything that had happened back then. He’d only given Gwen the basics at the time, and Rhys didn’t know either, and he’d intended to keep it from Ianto too at first. Except once in the very dark of the night – a bad night, after a nightmare – he’d let it slip from him in the quiet darkness of their bed, taking comfort in Ianto listening. As he knew Jack needed, Ianto had listened and not spoken about it again out loud; just that was enough, enough that Jack could pretend, the next day and all the days after, that nothing had changed.

It was always how it had been back then, and it had worked for them. Still, a lot of things were different now.

And thus, Jack found Ianto closing the distance between them in a few strides and enfolding him in his arms, the way he’d often done after Jack’s particularly brutal deaths before, tucking his face into Jack’s neck and holding on. Jack melted into it immediately, pathetically glad of Ianto’s acknowledgement, at being held and grounded in place; even raising his hand to thread through the back of Ianto’s mist-damp hair and clutch the back of his jumper helped to stop them from trembling so much.

The touch said, _it’s okay_. Not that it was, but he knew that Ianto meant it more in the sense of _I’m here. We’re all here_. Which was true enough, despite everything.

Jack held him back, letting the feeling of Ianto’s warmth and the beat of his heart comfort him, trying to give as much solace as he took from it.

Ianto came and squeezed into his side of the sofa next to Jack. By the time Gwen came and sat on the other side and draped her legs over both their laps like a warm blanket a little while later, Jack was already starting to feel better. At last, Rhys led Anwen down the stairs, switching off the TV that none of them were watching anymore – which Jack was actually extremely grateful for – and putting another log on the fire, before coming to join them. There was a brief moment of shuffling until he had squeezed in between Gwen and Jack, pressing a kiss to the sides of both their heads before giving Ianto’s hand a squeeze, and patting their collective blanket covered laps for Anwen.

She only hesitated a moment before coming to snuggle up in between her family.

* * *

  
After Anwen had gone to sleep, Rhys carried her up to her room, leaving him and Gwen and Ianto alone for a minute of thoughtful silence, standing in the hallway.

“Jack.”

He blinked, broken out of his musings by Gwen’s voice, as she came up and took both his hands in hers. He forced a smile. “Gwen.”

“Come on. Bed.” she said, in a tone that brooked no argument. The way she was looking at him told him she knew exactly what he was thinking, the precise memories that were passing through his head. She squeezed his hands, then let one of them go, reaching out. “You too, Ianto.”

Jack smiled gratefully, letting Gwen lead him and Ianto to the slightly larger bedroom, nominally Gwen and Rhys’s. In practice, the four of them slept all together a good amount of the time. If they’d learned nothing else in the last four years, they’d at least learned how to look after one another, and nothing grounded Jack like being curled up in a warm bed with all of these people he’d come to love pressed in close beside him.

And so now the four of them lay together under the thick duvet in Gwen and Rhys's bedroom. They did this fairly regularly, when one of them was suffering with their memories, keeping them close and making sure they knew they had family around them.

Today, it was Ianto curled up in the middle, leaning back between Jack’s legs against his chest, Gwen on their right hand, Rhys on their left, all their arms tangled up and clutching Ianto in between.  
  
It was easier to talk like that, easier to let out fears and have someone you trusted bear witness to them, make them easier to carry.  
  
“I can't stop thinking about Lisa,” Ianto was saying. “They… they used corpses, turned them into cybermen this time...” Jack watched Ianto swallow hard, Adam’s apply bobbing in his throat. “She’d suffered enough.”  
  
“It wasn't her,” soothed Jack, hand stroking through Ianto's hair. “I had her and the others cremated, back then. Any remaining cyber tech destroyed.”

“I know,” said Ianto, tipping his head back into Jack's touch. “I just can't stop thinking about it.”  
  
“I'm not surprised,” said Rhys, sympathetic despite his own clear horror. Jack knew Gwen had filled him in after Ianto had been brought back and they’d all moved in together, on Ianto’s history and Lisa and the circumstances surrounding him joining Torchwood Three, if only so that Rhys knew what topics to tread lightly on. “Take a moment. We’re here.”  
  
Ianto reached for his hand, offering him a grateful nod. “And if... if I was still dead,” he said, unprompted, as though working through his thoughts, “it would’ve been me too.”  
  
Jack winced; they'd all been thinking it he supposed, but hearing it like this, from Ianto... he pressed a kiss to Ianto's temple from behind. “Don't think about it.”  
  
But Ianto ignored him, face twisting, carrying on with a sort of reckless horror. "Rhiannon didn’t have me cremated... God, maybe it _was_ me. I mean, not _here_ , not one of those ones, but back in Cardiff… maybe it was _my_ decaying body up there, my skeleton in a cyberman’s metal skin.” He prodded his ribs, eyes blank. “Weird.”  
  
“Ianto...”  
  
"What? I've got a grave, haven't I?" He held up his hands and peered at them in mingled horror and fascination. "Maybe my original body's still out there, and got turned into a cyberman today." He laughed, bitter and humourless. “Imagine that.”  
  
“ _Ianto!”_ said Gwen, sounding sharp, but only because she was on the edge of tears. “Stop it! You're here, and that's what matters.” She cupped his cheek and turned his face so he was looking at her. “Yeah? It's fixed now. The only version of you that matters is the one right here.”

Jack watched as their eyes met for a long moment. Then, very slowly, Ianto let his head fall to Gwen’s shoulder and his eyes squeeze closed against her arm; Jack, familiar with Ianto’s own very specific form of body language after all this time, recognised this as acceptance, acknowledgement and gratitude.

Clearly Gwen and Rhys were well on their way to learning too, because Gwen wrapped her arms around Ianto’s shoulders and pulled his head to her chest, and Rhys sat forward, curling around him protectively and rubbing the small of his back. Jack, smiling, tried to enfold all three of them even closer in his arms, pressing his chin to the side of Ianto’s head, burying his face in his hair and dropping a kiss there.

“What about Anwen?” said Ianto, straightening up a bit after half a minute of thoughtful silence.

“What _about_ her?” said Gwen, turning to look at him. Jack’s heart sank; they all knew what he meant, because they had all been thinking about it too.

“What can we do to help her with this?” asked Ianto softly. “We were lucky, today. She saved us. But...” he tailed off, and once again Jack knew what he was thinking.

_How much more powerful is she going to get? And what do we do when she does?_

_How do we help her control it?_

“We’ll get through it,” said Rhys, leaning his head against Ianto’s. “I reckon we don’t need to do anything special… if we teach Anwen to care, to not want to hurt people, like we would be doing anyway, then she won’t use it to hurt people. If we teach her to be kind to others and herself, she will, magic or no magic. It’s as simple as that.”

“He’s right,” said Jack, close to Ianto’s ear. “There’s not much else we _can_ do, I think.”

“Yeah,” said Gwen. “Now, stop worrying and go to sleep.”

“Easier said than done,” mumbled Ianto, but Jack knew it was a token protest at best; they were all exhausted, wrung out by fear and sorrow. And sure enough, as Gwen nuzzled the side of his head and Jack hooked his ankle around Ianto’s and leaned down to kiss the side of his face and Rhys squeezed him around the middle, he felt Ianto relax slightly in his arms.

That was how they fell asleep, the four of them wound together with Ianto in the middle and the blankets pulled up close as the mist pressed in on the damp window panes outside.

* * *

Jack wasn’t at first sure what had woken him.

He slept a lot more and a lot deeper these days than he had when he was immortal. He suspected it was less to do with needing the rest and more to do with the fact that Anwen was old enough to sleep through most nights now, and Ianto was always at his side in bed and Rhys and Gwen there too more often than not, and no Rift alarms to break up the night hours, and none of the responsibilities of the Captain of Torchwood Three, then all in all sleep was just easier to come by.

Except he still had those responsibilities, didn’t he? If today had proved nothing else, it had proved that the work of Torchwood would never be over, not really.

Still, it hadn’t been them that had won the day. Martha had also told him the Doctor and a friend of his had been involved, yes, _but_ …

Jack frowned. Doctor or not, the cybermen would have killed all of their little family today, if not for Anwen. Whatever power she had, it was already stronger than any of them had thought, and growing every day just as she did.

And that, he knew, was a lot of responsibility to place on the shoulders of a four-year-old, however brave or resilient or loved she was.

He was just thinking about this, lying awake and staring at the ceiling and listening to Ianto, Gwen and Rhys’s sleep breathing and occasional soft snores, when he heard a very faint sound from down the hallway.

Crying, he realised. There it was again.

Coming from Anwen’s room.

Jack sighed, gently beginning to extricate himself from the others without waking them. They’d shifted in their sleep, making it a bit easier. But even so, it was a skill he’d practiced, and he was good at it. Ianto mumbled a little in his sleep as Jack shifted his head off his chest, but didn’t wake, simply curling closer to Gwen, Rhys’s arm still around his waist.

Jack let out a breath, brushing his fingers briefly through Ianto’s hair and going out into the corridor.

He knocked very softly on Anwen’s bedroom door; as he did, the sobbing stopped abruptly.  
“Come in,” she said in a tiny little voice.

Jack did, seeing her sitting up in bed. He suspected she’d been doing magic a moment ago – perhaps the little drifting lights she’d always loved to make as a baby, pretty and dark purple in the darkness of her room – but had stopped just before he’d come in. There was always a faint lingering smell in the air after, sort of like old, dried flowers and dust, and he could smell it now, just subtle enough that he would have missed it if he hadn’t known exactly what to look for.

He’d smelled it on the beach earlier too, only a thousand times stronger, more violent and filled with fear.

But he put it from his mind for the moment, as curled up in her bedclothes was Anwen, teary-eyed and hunched.

“Uncle Jaaack...” Anwen whined, her lip wobbling as she reached out to him with both hands.

Jack was over beside her bed in two long strides. He sighed, stroking her hair back from her face. “Shhh, it’s okay,” he said, as she caught his hand in her small ones, holding onto it. She pulled on his hand and he knew what she wanted; he sat down on the edge of the bed, and Anwen shuffled up to let him lean back against the pillows, curling up against his chest immediately, her head over his heart.

Anwen, like Jack, had grown up with touch as comfort. With four loving adults in the house, she had never wanted for love, or hugs or kisses, or affection. Even Ianto – who had grown up in a household without much physical affection, something so alien to Jack that it always made his chest hurt whenever he remembered it – was making an effort, because he knew how important it was for Anwen, for the way their little family operated and held itself together.

And so Jack did what he always did and pulled Anwen into his arms, pressing a kiss to her forehead. “Can’t sleep, huh?”

She sniffled, pressing her face to the front of his pyjama shirt. “Woke up. I couldn’t fall asleep again.”

He stroked his fingers softly though her hair. “That’s okay,” he said. “I can’t sleep either.”

“...Uncle Jack?”

“Yeah?”

“Did I do a bad thing today?”

He drew in a quick breath at the question, and the sad, doubtful little voice she said it in. “ _No_ ,” he told her immediately, wanting to make sure she knew this for certain. “You did a very good, very brave thing.”

She pouted, screwing up her little face as though deep in thought. “Mum was all scared. You and Dad and Uncle Ianto got scared too.”

Jack sighed, holding her close. “We _were_ scared,” he said, truthfully. “What happened today… that was scary. But not you. You did good, kid.”

She sniffed. “I was scared of those flying metal things.”

“Me too. But they’re gone now.”

“I made them go away.”

“...Yeah.” He pulled back, stroking her face and looking into her eyes. “Did you know you could do that, before?”

She sniffed, and shrugged, looking upset.

“How did you do it? How did you know what to do?”

“Um...” she frowned, as though giving it genuine thought for the first time. “Dunno. Just did.”

“Okay,” he said. “Well. We’ll need to figure out what you can and can’t do… yeah?”

“Mmm,” she said, doubtfully.

“But not tonight,” said Jack, wiping away a tear from her face with his thumb and cradling her in his arms again. “Tomorrow, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, nodding her head a bit. She yawned.

Jack chuckled. “See?” he said. “You are sleepy.”

She laughed, just the tiniest bit, and looked offended. “Nooo!”

“….Little, tiny bit?”

“Mmm. Little, _tiny_ bit,” allowed Anwen, with an adorably skeptical expression that he suspected she’d got from Ianto. “’Cause you’re here.”

He smiled, stroking her hair and pressing a kiss to it. “Then I’ll stay, and you sleep. That sound good to you?”

“...Okay,” said Anwen.

Jack shifted, so he was lying in the bed with her blankets over his legs, and Anwen lying on his chest with her head over his heart, her small hands bunched in the fabric of his shirt.

Before long, she was asleep. Jack stayed awake a little while longer, before the gentle rhythm of her breaths lulled him too, as the pale grey of a new day began to creep through the curtains.

**Author's Note:**

> ....I didn't rewatch Death in Heaven specifically for this and it's been a while so I hope I didn't get anything glaringly wrong with the plot of it. I was just possessed by this idea until I wrote it, that's all.  
> Regardless, hope you enjoyed!


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